🇮🇹 Order Up! A Conversation with Giulia Scarpaleggia, Cookbook Author, Cooking Instructor and Mother of a Very Opinionated Five-Year-Old
A Tuscan cookbook author on vegetables, leftovers, and what her grandmother accidentally taught her.
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From Her Grandmother's Bedroom to Her Daughter's Dinner: Giulia Scarpaleggia on Cooking as Memory
Giulia Scarpaleggia is a cookbook author and cooking class teacher in Tuscany, most recently of Vegetables in the Italian Way (published this month! [Buy it on Bookshop, Amazon]), and she writes the Letters from Tuscany newsletter on Substack. She still lives in the house where her grandmother cooked, where her father was born, where she spent nights reading as a kid in what is now her kitchen. The reason her story resonates with One Potato is that legacy and more — it’s how honestly she talks about the gap between the dream she had about feeding her daughter and the actual five-year-old sitting at her table.
Livia is opinionated. She’ll forage bitter greens in a field and refuse a salad at dinner. She eats octopus at school but for a long time would only eat pasta with butter at home. But now, Giulia has given up cooking two meals. She’s given up trying to stage the food-loving childhood she imagined. She’s landed somewhere calmer: offer good food, don’t force it. Her job is the what and the when. Livia’s job is the if and the how much.
In this week’s Order Up!, we talk to Giulia about all the lessons she’s learned from feeding her own daughter, to how to truly cook delicious vegetables the Italian way. From what it actually feels like to stop cooking a separate meal for your kid to how to get a picky eater excited about vegetables (spoiler: pick them together), Giulia shares the meaning behind cucina povera, the art of making do, and the Italian habit of cooking vegetables twice.
Giulia cooks for her family in the same room where three generations cooked before her. What she passes down isn’t a recipe collection. It’s a way of being in the kitchen — low pressure, high care, and plenty of room for a kid to become whoever she’s going to be.
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A Conversation with Giulia Scarpaleggia, Italian Cooking Instructor and Cookbook Author
Introduce Yourself: I’m Giulia Scarpaleggia. I’m a cooking class instructor based in Tuscany, a cookbook author, and a food writer; I write the Substack Letters from Tuscany, and blog, Juls’ Kitchen.
My husband, Tommaso, and I live in Tuscany, in the house where my father was born and where my grandmother was born. It’s the family house. We have a five-year-old daughter, Livia, and a dog.
I’ve been writing about food online for about 17 years — my blog started in 2009. I work with Tommaso — he’s the photographer of everything we do, the video maker, the podcast producer — the tech guy in the back office. I’m the front office: the one writing, teaching, and cooking.
A lot of food professionals talk about culinary school or restaurant training. What does it mean to you that your path starts in a family kitchen?
I’m a home cook who helps other home cooks build confidence and enjoy cooking at home. I learned from other home cooks — my grandmother, a little from my mom, the people I meet at the market, the butcher. And I read a lot of cookbooks.
Because I’m a home cook, I understand what’s hard for other home cooks. My recipes are tested in a home kitchen with a normal oven. Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t, and I can teach people how to tell if their oven is doing what they want it to.
I think good food should be democratic. Everyone should be able to cook good food and have the tools to make it. That’s what I love to teach — home cook to home cook.
You’ve written about expecting to have a relaxed relationship around family meals, and how hard that turned out to be. What were the early days like?
I had so many expectations. Some people dream about dressing their daughter like themselves; I was dreaming about cooking with mine, feeding her all the food I cook for students!
But she’s opinionated. She has her own ideas about what she likes and what she doesn’t. At school she eats everything. We’re lucky, the public school here cooks with local organic ingredients, so I know she’s eating well at least once a day. That takes a lot of pressure off.
At home, I had a lot of expectations about what she would eat. And then one day she told me, “My tastes are my tastes. I know what I like.” What can you say to that? I want to teach her to recognize her own cravings, what she likes and what she doesn’t. So I said, yes, you’re right.
Now I try to offer two or three good things at dinner, with at least one thing I know she’ll eat. The others sit next to her plate. Sometimes she sniffs them. Sometimes she refuses them. Sometimes she surprises me and tries something new. My role as a mom is to offer her good food, not to force her.
You eventually landed on cooking one dinner for all of you — no negotiations, no separate meal. What made you stop offering alternatives?
Cooking something separately sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t. You spend time, money, and a lot of expectations on it — and then it doesn’t work.
It’s so much easier to cook one meal that’s good for everyone. Usually that’s some vegetables, some protein, and some pasta, rice, or bread, and I make sure that at least one of those things is something she’ll eat. Maybe it’s cucumber sticks. Maybe it’s pasta with olive oil and parmigiano. She understands that these are the options. If she wants to eat, she can have whatever’s on the table. Otherwise, she can wait until the next meal.
She’s not starving. We’re privileged — for us, children are not starving. She’ll have breakfast tomorrow. She’ll have lunch at school. I’m not worried.
You’ve written that exposure, familiarity, and time are more powerful than pressure. For parents who feel stuck or under pressure right now, what does the other side of that actually look like?
It’s like you remove the responsibility. It’s not on you. You decide what and where. They decide if and how much. So the pressure eases, because you’re cooking for yourself, you’re cooking for them, and then eventually they choose. It’s good that they listen to their appetite — you’re teaching them to listen to what they want to eat. Not forcing them to finish everything on the plate, not forcing them to try new things: that will help them for the rest of their lives.
Your new book is about vegetables. Since Livia can sometimes be a pasta-with-butter kid — how do you get her excited about vegetables?
I’m lucky, because she’s always loved vegetables in their pure form — steamed broccoli, cucumber sticks, roasted cauliflower. If I don’t try to mix vegetables into the pasta, it’s fine. She’ll have broccoli on the side, she’ll have pasta. That works for me.
What really excites her is when we can pick the vegetables ourselves. My mom is a vegetable gardener. I’m not, but I plant fava beans and peas. If we pick the fava beans and peas straight from the plant, she eats them. If we forage for greens, she tries everything. If I hand her a salad at the table, she’ll probably refuse it. But out in the field, picking bitter greens, she’s curious.
I try to get her excited about seasonality, too. Peppers come in summer. We don’t have peppers in winter. So we wait. She knows that soon there will be strawberries, then cherries, then apricots. When food is an adventure, the barriers come down and she tries new things.
Cucina povera — the art of making do. For a parent staring at a half-empty fridge and a hungry kid, what does that look like in practice?
Leftovers. We have to talk about leftovers.
One of the first things Livia learned to say wasn’t “what’s for dinner” — it was “what do we have as leftovers?” Because we teach cooking classes, we always have leftovers, and sometimes dinner is leftovers. That becomes normal. She respects them. She’s happy to eat them, because she sees us doing it, too. Kids learn that if you don’t finish something now, it can become another meal tomorrow.
And then there’s bread. Bread is a staple of Tuscan cooking, fresh and stale. Stale becomes soup. Fresh gets olive oil, a little salt, a bit of garlic. The simplest ingredients can make a very satisfying meal. You don’t have to plan a five-star dinner every night.
Your book is organized by cooking technique — braising, frying, roasting, stuffing — instead of by vegetable. Why did you structure it that way?
Organizing by technique helps you understand how to get the best out of a vegetable. It also lets you cook based on what you’re craving. If you want comfort, you flip to soups, stews, and baked dishes. If you want something quicker and fresher, the first chapter is toasts and salads — winter and summer both, usually more accessible and easy to prepare.
Another thing I love is that the book teaches you how to cook vegetables ahead and keep them in the fridge. I don’t meal plan, but if I buy vegetables, I’ll stew them, boil them, roast them, and keep them ready. Then I tell you what to do with them. Those vegetables can become a pasta sauce, a topping for a crostone, or the filling for a savory pie. You cook once and eat twice — a different dish each time.
You’ve written that once someone understands how and why Italians cook greens twice, they find freedom to improvise. On a busy Wednesday night, what does that improvisation actually look like?
Boil broccoli. If you’ve boiled broccoli, you already have the start of a second dish. Same with new artichokes — I put them on a crostone with mozzarella in the book, but lately I’ve been stewing them, chopping them, and using them as pasta sauce or the start of a risotto.
Double-cooking means cooking a vegetable once, keeping it in the fridge, and then cooking it a second time to bring it back to life. The second cook adds flavor and turns it into a new dish. And because the first step is already done, it’s fast.
Do you have a favorite recipe in the book? Something to recommend to someone flipping through?
Two come to mind. The roasted carrot pasta. You roast the carrots with garlic, skin on. You blend the carrots and the caramelized garlic with some pasta water and pecorino, then toss with pasta. Separately, you fry a little guanciale or pancetta. It looks and tastes like a carbonara — egg pasta — but without the eggs. If you have roasted carrots waiting in the fridge, this comes together in 15 minutes while the pasta cooks.
And broccoli again. Outside Italy, broccoli tends to stay al dente and crisp — which I like — but if you let your fear go and cook the broccoli a little longer, the sweetness comes out and it becomes the sauce for your pasta. Boil the broccoli, lift it out, cook the pasta in the same water so it’s more flavorful, then mix everything together. When I make this in cooking classes, people ask, “Did you add cream? Butter?” It’s just broccoli cooked a bit longer.
In your writing, you’ve documented what Livia ate at age three — her color-coded pasta preferences, her love of aged parmigiano. What are you trying to hold onto when you write those pieces?
I don’t want to forget. I think later, oh, that was easy — or, that was a terrible moment — and the details disappear. I want the details. I see the world through food. My memories, my love — they’re all connected to food. Being able to remember how I fed her at three, or how I’m feeding her now at five, activates other memories.
My grandmother passed away last summer at almost 95. Livia was two, my grandmother was 92 — 90 years apart. I was trimming artichokes with my grandmother, and Livia was drawing next to us. Then she came over and said, “I want to do that.” I showed her. She started trimming baby artichokes on her own, perfectly. We did it together every year after that.
When my grandmother passed, I asked Livia, “Do you have a favorite memory of your great-grandmother?” She said, “Trimming the baby artichokes.” I have that picture in my head. I have a photo of them doing it together in the book. That was precious for my grandmother, too — shelling peas, shelling fava beans, trimming artichokes. Those were the moments they had.
Your grandmother taught you to cook by proximity — you absorbed it. You’ve said the passion came from her, not from school. Do you think that can be passed on deliberately, or does it only happen when a child picks it up on their own?
What I can say is this: my grandmother once told me, “Poor girl. You could have been in an office, and now you’re cooking.” She didn’t realize what she had given me.
She didn’t set out to pass down recipes with a second meaning. She was just cooking. For her, cooking was how she showed love and took care of people. I happened to be there. I love cooking now, but that came later. In the beginning, I was just spending time with her. There was no intention behind it. She was doing her thing and taking care of me — partly through food.
What’s one cooking skill or technique you use all the time that you think is really helpful for home cooks to know?
Can I say saving stale bread? I have a cotton bag behind my door. Every little piece of stale bread that’s left goes there. It becomes breadcrumbs, soups, stuffings, cakes. It’s a habit, so it’s something you can teach; my daughter already knows where the stale bread goes. It’s a way of saving something you would throw away and turning it into a meal.